If you're going to cut people up, add drama

This isn't a sentence I ever thought I'd have cause to write but there it is: watching a cancerous tumour being removed from someone's brain via their nose is really quite dull.

Who would have guessed it? The publicity blurb promised that Channel 4's The Operation: Surgery Live, showing four operations on four consecutive nights, would be "groundbreaking TV", but for an audience weaned on Channel Five's Cosmetic Surgery Live or even Channel 4's 10 Years Younger, which regularly chops bits off people and re-attaches them elsewhere, what ground is there left to break?

It would have taken something really spectacular to top the Living TV special in which the members of the 80s pop group Bucks Fizz were surgically refashioned. A live hamster emerging from a spleen, perhaps, or the accidental severing of a main artery with Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like geysers of blood.

For all the medical talk and the high-brow presentation - a newsreader sitting in a lecture theatre - it really wasn't so very different from seeing Kerry Katona's breasts cut off or Brigitte Nielsen's face being re-arranged. This was blood-lust TV for people unfortunate enough to live in countries where public beheadings no longer exist but who haven't quite got the hang of YouTube.

It's cheap though. How much does it cost to stick a camera in the corner of an operating theatre and press play? Not a whole lot. Prepare yourself for more tumours, more breasts; surgery TV with its almost pornographic fascination with body parts is cut-price entertainment for weekday nights.

By a funny coincidence, there was real medical drama on TV that night on another channel: the last-ever episode of ER. More coincidentally still, us ER fans recognised immediately a brain tumour removal from a conscious patient as the plot device used in ER season 8 on Dr Mark Greene.

But that's the thing about plot devices. They enable plots and even though ER features overpaid actors in fancy dress spouting lines they don't understand, it did the brain op scenario about a million times better. Because cancer isn't just an illness, it's a story, a terrifying, gripping, appalling narrative which has profound and lasting consequences on those who suffer it, those who survive it, on their relationships, their families, their lives.

Yet somehow, Channel 4 managed to make it dull, showing only the very least interesting aspect of it, the white cells under the surgeon's scalpel. It takes time and money to create characters you know well enough to care about, a whole lot of it to have a camera crew follow someone for months and even more of it again to commission a script, cast actors and build a set.

We spent years with Dr Greene. We knew his wife and kids. We followed his treatment and his final illness and the episode in which he died was just a TV show, but it was also genuinely heartbreaking.

Because sometimes stories tell a deeper truth than reality. And it's another sort of heartbreak that TV companies are stopping making drama and that, instead, TV talent shows engineer contestants' lives to fit their narrative formulas. The ascendancy of Susan Boyle is one of the most perfect stories ever told and yet the manipulation of her, a woman with minor learning difficulties, into a character fit for prime-time TV, has been so cynically done.

Channel 4 used to commission drama for its 11pm slot; now it doesn't bother. It's far easier to fill up the schedules with prurient surgery shows or to take "real" people for the sole purpose of turning them into stock characters - the cheeky chappy, the loving mum, the 47-year-old spinster who lives with her cat

It was time for ER to go - the last few series were lame and mawkish - but The Operation's pituitary gland tumour could have waltzed out of the nostril in a top hat and tails singing "I love Paris in the spring time" and it would still have been less gripping than Dr Greene's final scenes. Like ITV's handling of Susan Boyle, which last week started to resemble a type of abuse, The Operation was just another TV freak show. It's stories we need.

Those old poets could teach this lot a thing or two about scandal

If only poets had thought of this before: making inappropriate sexual advances, sleeping with other people's spouses, stabbing each other in the back, then they may make front page news more often. Oh yes, that's right, they have Percy Shelley, for example, was precisely the sort of incontinent sexual lothario who would have failed to become the Oxford professor of poetry, what with driving his first wife to suicide, being unfaithful to his second one and then impregnating his mistress. Or take John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, who died a syphilitic alcoholic at the age of 33.

Allegations of sexual harassment by Derek Walcott, dirty tricks, the claims that Ruth Padel had an affair with critic John Walsh which resulted in the poem "Home Cooking" ("You spread our Free Range Duck/ Breasts with your trade-mark mix/ Of honey, soya, Chinese Five Spice/While I etch/ A fingernail down your spine/Ending in a fuck/ The length of our kitchen table") and the accusation that she'd shopped Walcott to him have done wonders for poetry.

It makes it seem relevant, part of everyday life, rather than entrapped in a tome at the bottom of a library shelf. The poor poets, they've been so terribly unfashionable for so long, but the BBC has just launched a season devoted to poetry, and who knows, maybe Padel's duck breasts served with a side order of Machiavellian intrigue was precisely what the art form needed?

Oh, Julie, why didn't you just keep your trap shut?

I enjoy a spot of schadenfreude as much as the next person and watching Tories being bullied by the right-wing press is a particularly fine spectator sport, but it was hard not to feel a twinge of unease about the pillorying of Julie Kirkbride.

She was just another greedy, unrepentant, over-entitled MP, wasn't she? And yet, last week, as she regularly appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail, it seemed like the entire expenses scandal, the weeks of revelations, came down to her (with Margaret Moran playing her occasional sidekick).

By far the greatest majority of MPs' expense scandals involve men, since they form the greatest majority of MPs, yet it was Kirkbride, a woman of a certain age, a woman who has the temerity not to dye her greying hair, who last week came to be the public face of the entire debacle.

You can't really get away with headlines like "Burn the witch!" these days but, at moments last week, it felt like this was a mere technicality.

It's hard to see how what she did was so different from what dozens of other MPs have done. She'd paid for her brother's computer equipment and let him live rent-free, like Bill Cash and Ian Gibson, who respectively paid for their daughters' rent and mortgage, and she employed her sister as David Cameron employed his sister-in-law.

Why has Gerald Kaufman, with his claim for his £8,865 Bang & Olufsen television, his £19,200 food bill and his imported antique carpets, dodged the lynch mob? Why has John Maples, who claimed a gentlemen's club was his main home, escaped? Why are the flippers like Michael Gove not at the bottom of the parish pond?

And then Julie Kirkbride went and ruined it all by opening her mouth. "Like millions of women, I am a mother who works ... what effect will stories like mine have on mothers who aspire to be MPs? We want Parliament to be more representative and that includes women with school-age children."

Oh Julie, Julie, Julie. Not the pseudo-feminist defence, please. If women decide they don't want to be MPs, it's because they don't want to be associated with a bunch of ravening crooks. Undoubtedly much more could be done to attract women into Parliament, but giving them the option to fiddle their exes probably isn't one of them.

• Barbara Ellen is away

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